Looting, Grave Robbery, Property Restitution--Not Only Poles from Jews: more books on the subject

jan peczkis|Tuesday, December 15, 2015

The list author says: "Jan T. Gross, in his recently-published ZLOTE ZNIWA (GOLDEN HARVESTS), has presented a decidedly unobjective focus on looting. The reader is led to believe that only Poles looted from Jews, desecrated sites of the Jewish dead, and benefited from German crimes by acquiring post-Jewish properties--or that Jews were the only victims of such event

The list author says: "Jan T. Gross, in his recently-published ZLOTE ZNIWA (GOLDEN HARVESTS), has presented a decidedly unobjective focus on looting. The reader is led to believe that only Poles looted from Jews, desecrated sites of the Jewish dead, and benefited from German crimes by acquiring post-Jewish properties--or that Jews were the only victims of such events.

Far from it! WWII and post-WWII Poles indeed looted Jews, but also Poles looted other Poles, Jews looted Jews, Jews looted Poles, etc. Even the Germans, for all their proverbial ingrained discipline and sense of social order, looted the bombed-out sites of dead Germans.

Property-restitution questions are nothing new. Many decades before the Holocaust, while Partitioned Poland had been under foreign rule, Jews had been the direct financial beneficiaries of Russian-confiscated and Prussian-confiscated Polish properties. Should modern Poles demand financial compensation from modern Jews?

During the Nazi deportations to the death camps, Jews had to ask the exact same "When is it right to acquire the heirless (or apparently heirless) properties of the dead?" that Poles were to ask, then and later.

Nor was looting and grave robbery limited to the desperate conditions of wartime. Soviet citizens looted the Polish Katyn-related graves. Finally, the looting of archaeological sites, by professionals and commoners alike, has assumed epidemic proportions in recent decades.